4mo ago

Gun in hand, the Israeli settler tells the Palestinian: I will kill you

www.thetimes.com Gun in hand, the Israeli settler tells the Palestinian: I will kill you

Palestinians in the West Bank say they are being driven from their homes by a campaign of terror waged by armed civilians determined to take their land

The girls, aged 14 to 16, have come for settler training to learn how to occupy Palestinian land — breaking international law. “God promised us this land and told us if you don’t take it, bad people will try and take it and you will have a war,” says Emuna Billa, 19, one of the camp supervisors. “Why do we have a war in Gaza? Because we don’t take Gaza.”

Their guru is Daniella Weiss, a 79-year-old grandmother in a long skirt and patterned headscarf. Founder of the Nachala or Homeland movement, she has been setting up illegal settlements for 49 years and was recently put under international sanctions. “You will be the new emissaries,” she tells the 50 or so girls at the camp. “I call it redeeming, not settling and this is our duty.”

She unfurls a map of Israel and the Palestinian territories dotted with vivid pink house symbols to represent existing and proposed Jewish settlements. Not only are these all across the West Bank, but also in Gaza. Already 674 people have signed up for beachside plots there, she tells me, and “many more want to join”. When someone asks her about settling Lebanon she smiles and says, “Yes, there too”.

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When someone asks her about settling Lebanon she smiles and says, “Yes, there too”.
Great, more war crimes.
- As a Lebanese, I advise them that we are already destroying our country by ourselves!

Israeli invader*
- Settler is more accurate, and is a subset of invader. America were invaders in Iraq, but didn't invade to set up permanent settlements. Israel is invading Palestine in order to set up permanent settlements
  
  Coloniser?

It's not clear to me that the fundamental ideals of a liberal democracy are compatible with a state where one race or religion is held above all others; or with a state where some races or religions are considered less equal.
Arguably the US is still working on recognizing this idealism and didn't fully reckon with it until the 1960s.
- Basically everyone is sticking their head in the sand re: Israel being an Ethnostate. Basically "sure, but they deserve it". That had some credibility behind it 70 years ago. Today? Not so much.
  
  I've come to find out that in-spite of having many Israeli friends and some family members, I had no idea about what Israeli culture and society were really like. It is mind-boggling to me that the only Jewish people I see speaking against genocide seem to be a part of the diaspora. Every time I hear or see a Jewish person from/ in Israel speaking on this issue, its like "Well its necessary" is basically the argument. Like, I'm sure there must be voices in Israel to the contrary, but I can't seem to find them.
  Its as if Zionism has supplanted Judaism in Israel entirely and there is no distinction in current Israeli culture or media.
  
  I honestly feel like if the national powers at the time had been actually serious about the Jewish people deserving a homeland after the horrors of the Holocaust, then Israel should have been created out of a portion of western Germany.
  
  If there was credibility for a Jewish ethnostate 70 years ago due to the Holocaust and global antisemitism, how do we get to say things are better now and take the country back. Especially with all the other ethnostates in the world.
  Obviously there is a problem because the region had changed hands over the past 1-2000 years and had other ethnic groups when the country was established by the Allies. The idea of having taken the land from Germany instead of the area around l Jerusalem sounds like poetic justice, but ignores that they have a historic homeland. Anyone would want their historic homeland with their historic religious sites back over somewhere else.
  It seems like Jews are treated as second class when it comes to that. Talk of giving Mt Rushmore back is because it was that tribes sacred religious site, and no one would be happy giving them another mountain in another state.
- And this isn't even the first time we've realized this either. Look at Ireland, and how they only achieved peace when they enforced equality with their power sharing agreement. Heck, look at the entire EU. Instead of Germany and France invading each other every 30 years, they just said "fuck it", and let their citizens live on both sides of the border. Trying to create ethnostates and encourage division never works.
  
  At this point the only serious solution to the Israel/Palestine conflict is the "one state solution".
- For years we kept being told that Israel had "Western Values" as part of the pro-Zionist propaganda in the West.
  And indeed they do: 19th Century Western Values.

Why aren’t these terrorist training camps being bombed?
Israel is a terrorist state.

Daniella Weiss, what a horrible person. She will probably never face justice for her crimes.

Fucking cultists.
(To be clear, Judaism in general isn't a cult, but these assholes' version sure looks like one.)
- Judaism is a cult, Christianity is a cult, Islam is a cult. They are all cults. Insane fantasies and power grabs. There aren't any good religions.
- Zionism == Judism. and aparthied Israel does not represent the Jewish faith or people. It represents stinking hatful genocidal racism which no nation on the world should accept while in reality many fully enable and aide
  Edit: why tf do you need to escape the backlash in my comment like I'm coding perl
  
  You should probably use a double slash in that non-equality sign as a single slash will be seen as an escape character by some parsers and then not rendered. In my client it just shows two equal signs, i.e. the opposite of what you wanted to convey.
  
  Those particular Zionists are the religious kind, though. They're specifically claiming they're entitled to all of the Palestinians' land because their sky daddy said so. The secular ones usually claim Zionism is needed because that ethnic Jews need a place to be safe from persecution.
  Also, never, ever use a double equality sign to say things are not equal. It will only cause confusion.
  
  Israel represents half of the global Jewish population. The US represents most of the remainder. In the US 8 in ten say caring about Israel is important or essential.
  Israel and its actions like it or not represents Jewish people as a whole fairly well. Obviously not every single person but the majority thereof.
  
  At least it's not Java with
  undefined
  
  someString.replaceAll("\\\\\\\\", "\\\\");

All settlers are terrorists. There are over 750k people living in the occupied territories. They need to gtfo asap. Their claims hold no water and there is absolutely no legal foundation to creating little settler colonies on another people's land. I'm talking about the West Bank and the other occupied territories here, not Israel proper.

Just a friendly reminder, that Israel is an Apartheid state - according to the ICJ.

Can we stop calling them "settlers"?
Edit: "settlers" is an accurate term, but due to generations of teaching a white washed version of America's colonial history, the term doesn't hold the negative connotation that it should to average Americans. It just doesn't conjure the images it should, whether consciously or not.
- They’re settlers. What they do is violently expel people from their homes in order to claim it for themselves.
  Settlers are people who do that.
  There’s no need to stop calling them the word that correctly describes what they do.
  
  How about: invader, encroacher, intruder, illegal immigrant, trespasser, violator, infringer or conqueror?
  
  I understand. My point is that, for whatever reason (likely generations of white washed education regarding America's colonial history), people in the US don't view the word "settler" with the contempt it deserves.
  
  Then are the people illegally coming to the US "settlers" or are they still refugees ?
  Because I'm confused on the difference with that definition.
- Invaders would be more accurate.
- I don't see any daylight between these folks and the KKK this is basically the klan with different headgear
- That's what they are, even according to themselves they're settlers. Perhaps a more accurate term might be settler-colonial but I think just settler works (when you stop glorifying America settlers it especially works.)

They have become what they swore to destroy
- Nazis, more specifically.

I'm not surprised. That's what Israeli settlers are doing for decades, not just since October.
Tell me how people should not get radicalized, when your home and existence and that of your family is constantly threatened.
I'm not condoning the actions of Hamas, they are brutal and wrong. But Israel created that beast themselves and left Palestinians with no other options.
If you want a more human focused instead of politics I would recommend to read Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation
Jewish author Michael Chabon and Israeli born author Ayelet Waldman asked writers, journalists, authors of both sides and not involved at all, to visit the occupied territories and write an essay about their expierience. It shows a heartbreakingly personal point of view of the situation before the current war.

Thanks American imperialists for enabling these invaders
- Yes we already finished first genocide (the Native Americans), but what about second genocide?

The wild things is, their* religious leaders know they are worshipping a co-opted war god, that exists only in their shadows.
*Spelling

Wow Israel really thinks the world will go like "welp it is now a conflict between civilians so the Israeli government can't be blamed". I bet they are praying that locals organise a defense against these invader settlers so that they can pretend like they have a good excuse to send troops.
- This already happens
- Settlers like this have forfeited their status as innocent civilians. This makes them active aggressors in my eyes.
- That is literally what they've done for many, many decades, let the settlers expand and antagonize, then send in the military to protect the innocent civilians living on Palestinian land.

There was an article about her a few months ago, and I wanted to again point out how Hamas's terrorist mickey mouse actually had more sound logic than this insane woman.

Farfour's grandfather explains to Farfour the history of the land. Tel Aviv, he explains, is the Jewish name for the land that was originally called Tel Al-Rabi and the Jews renamed it after occupying it in 1948. Farfour's grandfather gives Farfour the key and documents to the land and then he dies. Farfour exclaims "Grandpa entrusted me with this great trust but I don't know how to liberate this land from the filth of the criminal plundering Jews who killed my Grandpa and everybody." Farfour is then taken to an interrogation where he is "beaten to death by an actor posing as an Israeli official trying to buy Farfour's land" because Farfour had called him a "despicable terrorist." The episode has what seems to be an editorial mistake as a brief flash of a "Farfour in prison" sign is shown immediately prior to Saraa explaining that "Farfour was martyred while defending his land, the land of his fathers and forefathers. He was martyred at the hand of the criminals, the murderers, the murderers of innocent children who killed Iman Hijo, Muhammad Al-Duro, and many others."

“God promised us this land and told us if you don’t take it, bad people will try and take it
And that attitude right there is why there will most likely never be peace in the region.
There are hard-line factions on both sides of the conflict who are convinced that their religion grants them a god-given right to exclusive occupation of the same piece of dirt.
- There are hard-line factions on both sides
  :-/
  You're running into a degree of selection bias when you put "guy with gun seizing land" up against "group of residents who haven't fled yet".
  What does a moderate faction look like in this set up? Either the IDF backed settler doesn't show up or the Palestinian leaves. These are your non-escalatory solutions.
  their religion grants them a god-given right to exclusive occupation
  Waving a gun in your face after I've kicked down your door, but you're no better than me because you're also religious.
- Israeli fight because the Zionist brainwashed them in the name of god to fight. Palestinian fight to reclaim their land. Where exactly is "the hard-line factions on both sides of the conflict who are convinced thag their religion grants them a god-given right to exclusive occupation of the same piece of dirt."?

No, no! Israelis are nice people. The BBC told me and also I read it in a newspaper!
- Dude, settlers =/= all Israelis, they just have way too much political influence and are tolerated way too much. Think the proud boys/3%ers/border patrol vigilantes if Trump had won another term. Way too powerful, way too much influence, and way too encouraged, still not reflective of every American or even a majority.
  
  When you are traveling on the common backpacker routes, you'll met a lot of young Israelis who recently finished their military service.
  My expierience with them is, that those who are open minded and look at the world, are very much against what the narrow minded fundamentalists are doing at home and in Palestine.
  We have to stop to condem big groups of people on the actions of a few. This just makes us xenophobic, racist and hostile to everything different.
  Not all Israelis are violent fundamentalists. Judge the government and official forces, not the people.
  Not all Palestinians are Hamas terrorists.
  Not all Muslims are Islamists.
  Not all Americans are white supremacists or suport immigrant children in cages.
  Not all Germans are or were Nazis.
  Not all mexicans are cartel gangsters.
  
  If there's an overwhelming majority that supports it, there's nothing wrong with generalizing. Without support from most Russians Ukraine war wouldn't be possible. Without the support of most Israeli citizens there would be no genocide in Palestine. It's really not that complicated. The people are responsible for the government they voted for.

Even Shin Bet calls these people terrorists.

in a reasonable country this would trigger a red flag law.

Welcome to religion and war, boys and girls...
- So many good things have started with the line "we are gods chosen people" /s

"No body follows the old testament." "Jesus died and filled the prophecy, so the old testament doesn't apply." "But Jesus taught love and forgiveness. That's what the old testament was for."
I have heard everything growing up when asked about old testament stories. The brutality, supported raping and murdering of those that don't agree.
Then you have Christians. For their teachings to be true, they HAVE to support Israel. If not, the their religion is false.
You see this vicious cycle. See why religion is dangerous and the bases for all wars. Someone change my mind? Maybe I'm the crazy one.

The news source of this post could not be identified. Please check the source yourself. Media Bias Fact Check | bot support
- MBFC
  Bias Rating: RIGHT-CENTER; Factual Reporting: HIGH; Country: United Kingdom; MBFC Credibility Rating: HIGH CREDIBILITY)
  Wiki
  The Sunday Times is a British Sunday newspaper whose circulation makes it the largest in Britain's quality press market category. It was founded in 1821 as The New Observer. It is published by Times Newspapers Ltd, a subsidiary of News UK (formerly News International), which is owned by News Corp. Times Newspapers also publishes The Times.
  
  News Corp being Rupert Murdoch's company, the same one that controls Fox News and the WSJ in the US, and The Sun in the UK. Any News Corp property should be rated very poorly.

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